Opera Magna Review - Will You Be A Part Of Our History?
Transcript
Hey, I'm Alex Raffle from Board Gameco and today I'm reviewing Opera Magna from Ludas Magnus. Opera Magna is a two to four player Euro game designed by Tamasa Batista and Stefan Casali in which players are going to manipulate markets, try to build up the tableau and gather the goods they need in order to contribute towards the opera Magna. Before we dive further into this, this channel is sponsored by Allplay. More about them at the end of the video. And speaking of sponsored, while this review is not sponsored, Ludas Magnus Studios did sponsor a gameplay for this game. And so, please take any potential bias into account while watching this video. With that, let's go ahead and dive into it. Although, speaking of uh speaking of the gameplay, uh while I will give you a brief overview of the rules and how it works, if you want to see it all in action, please go ahead and check that out. Although, I will note, I don't actually know if the game plays up before this or after this, so keep your eyes peeled. But with that, in Opera Magna, you're going to be playing across nine rounds. In a turn, what you're going to be doing is you're going to be taking your merchant and you're going to be moving it to a different market sector. For example, if green's going first over here, I can move my merchant to any one of the sectors in which I don't already have a green merchant. I have a green merchant here, here, and obviously over here. So, I have to pick somewhere else to go. So, maybe I'll go ahead and move up over here to the different section of the market. From there, I'll look at the cards in my hand and attempt to manipulate the market. In fact, actually, I'm going to go over here. I'm going to go down here. I'm going to attempt to manipulate the market. I'm going to take this card and slide it in there and slide the other card out. So effectively, whenever you go to a market section, you're affecting the car, the the resources you're going to pay or get. In this case, I'm affecting the resources I'm going to get. The reason for that is because then you're going to go to the market. This
card will go away. I now have two cards left in my hand. I'm going to go to the market. I'm going to pay the cost at the top of the market. So, I'll pay two wood on my board going down to zero. And then I'll get the goods on the bottom part of the market. So, I'm going to bump this up two, which is also going to bump my quality marker up one. I'm going to bump this up one. And then I'm going to additionally get this deluxe resource over here, this uh refined resource, putting it at the top of my board. So again, in general, you start your turn by moving your merchant to a zone. The zone you move your merchant to is where you can affect the uh market, either what you're getting from the market or what you're paying in the market. And then from there, you're going to do that exchange, paying the top part and gaining the bottom part. Once you have all those goods, you're going to be contributing those goods towards buildings you have or towards sending those goods to the Opera Magna. But before you can actually send things to the Opera Magna, you're going to need a few things. The first thing you're going to need is you're going to need to unlock carts to deliver those goods.
That's where these buildings are going to come into play because when you successfully build a building, so for example, I have this resource here. I can take it and put it on the cost of that building. Once I get the second resource and then go ahead and build that building, I'll have the opportunity to put that building either on the right side of my board over here where it's going to give me an ability. For example, I'll put this over here. It'll give me this ability and it will unlock a cart. Alternatively, I can put it on the left side of my board where it's going to reduce my cost. is going to be a give me a discount on stone. Keeping in mind my board already has a discount over here on metal. Every board has a different discount and different set of exchanges. It's also going to unlock an exchange over here. I can exchange three sand for a glass once per turn. So basically building buildings is good because it gives you abilities either discounts or abilities. And then it unlocks things either on the left side or the right side of your board. Left side is going to be exchanges to get more refined resources. Right side is going to be carts that will help you actually deliver to opera magna. So again, you place a merchant, you affect the market, you make the exchange, then you place things on buildings, and then possibly deliver to the opera magna.
That's the turn structure. At the turn, you're going to replenish any buildings. So for example, over here, I would say, great, I'm out. I'm down to one building. I can take any of these buildings over here. You'll refill the market in order to make sure there's two buildings of each of the three levels always on display. And then you'll go over here, and you'll choose a card to add back to your hand so that you always have three cards in your hand. In this case, I can go ahead and pay nothing to K the leftmost card. Or I can pay one, two, or three regular resources in order to choose the card that best suits my engine. In this case, because I have a discount over here on this, I now have a discount on stone. Maybe I'll take this card, paying two resources of any type, I'll lower my my my metal by two, and I'll load up this market, and that is a turn. The next player will take their turn, and when they're done, that's basically a round or when all players are done, that's a round. That is the flow of the sequence in Opera Magna. You are sending your merchants around the board. You are affecting the market.
You're making the exchange. You're paying for buildings or the opera magna. There's a lot of other things, mostly abilities that will come into play. For example, when you go to the top section of a market, you're also going to get the ability over here because you're affecting the what you pay and you're usually making it higher. You're going to get the ability of the market almost as compensation. Each market has known ability. Depending on where you go, you're going to get that. Additionally, when you deliver goods to the opera magna, if you are the first person to deliver a good, you're going to get the ability on those token. These tokens are double-sided to give you more variability to the game. And then of course you have the decks full of of abilities which are going to define how you build up your tableau and what you're better at. Are you going to get extra resources, more refined resources? Are you going to have more points out of those buildings? The whole category of blue buildings will give you points. Different categories of buildings do different things. And you're trying to do all that to try to make the most of your nine turns in Opera Magna. That is a highle overview. It does cover most of what you're actually going to engage with, but if you want to see it all play out, check out the gameplay on the channel or any other content around this game. And with that, we're going to go ahead and dive into my review review of what I like, don't like, and can see other not liking. Starting off with what I like about the game. This is incredibly tight. It's incredibly tight.
You only have nine turns. Granted, you do a lot on your turn, but you only have nine core like well turns turn structures you do. You're going to take your merchant, move it somewhere, and do all the things. I've already repeated the sequence a few times, but you have to figure out what is most important to you. Do you really care about the abilities of the market? Those can be incredibly important. This one over here allows you to discard a raw resource in order to move your quality marker up three on these tracks. Getting your quality up up very quickly is incredibly helpful because it'll allow you to deliver goods where others don't have access to delivering those goods yet. And if you if you have access to something they don't, that means you can get all the abilities before they do. But in order to do that, you might be trading off the fact that they're building up a tableau full of discounts. they can keep manipulating the market more and more, making it more expensive to other players because they've built up a whole tableau of discounts on the side that can affect other players. It's kind of this give and take. It's not just a it's not just about how you're going to build your own tableau. It's about how building your own tableau is going to affect the other players. And so everything you do in the game matters. As you go to a market, you might be setting yourself up for success, but you also might be affecting all the goods other players can go.
Unless, of course, you went and put something into a market where they already have a a merchant in that bottom zone and they can't benefit from it to the same extent. You're constantly looking at what other players are doing and seeing how you can take the action that most benefits you while not just setting up the other players. Speaking of the market, I love the market manipulation in this game. This is an incredibly satisfying market manipulation engine in which you're constantly choosing whether to affect the top or the bottom of the market, which will affect the cost or what you gain, respectively. The top will go ahead and give you an extra ability. Those can be incredibly important. The bottom gives you a bunch of extra goods, but then again, you have to constantly move your merchants. You can't just keep going to the same zone. You have to move to other areas on the board. Meanwhile, you're juggling the fact that all these cards are always doing more. Higher top costs, lower bottom costs, and that staggers nicely with the game progression because as you get discounts in the game, because you will be unlocking discounts, you also being mindful that the general engine, the economy of the game is ramping up. You have to get your discounts in play in order to keep up with the affordability.
This is kind of a just, you know, it's it's inflation uh watching inflation in action in this game because you are getting cheaper and more discounts and better at far as paying for things. And as a result, everything in the game gets more expensive as you go through it. And so the market is an incredibly clever mechanism. The way it's structured, it loops you into the game. Again, in fact, the fact there's only nine rounds in the game, only nine turns. And again, in a three-player game, that's 27 marketer manipulations across three different markets. And yet, that's enough to constantly keep things different in the game. Meanwhile, you're balancing a ton of different things that are going on. Some things that are going to be different game to game. These abilities over here, uh there's different abilities for the different markets that will change things up. Uh the cars that enter the market to very start off the game is going to be different. Uh the cars that show up in the order they show up in will be different. These buildings will all give different abilities that totally change the way you approach the game. Having different abilities come into play earlier rather than later will change up how you engage with it. And having these all double-sided and randomized as far as where they show up.
All of these things contribute to a lot of moving mechanisms in the game. A lot of moving elements that give you the same core engine each time you play while giving you slightly different variations to what you're trying to do. And it does all of that in a game that the box says 60 minutes. I have found generally is probably in that 60 to 90 minute range. It does definitely come in closer to the 90 minutes. Especially earlier games, I think you can get down to 60 minutes if you're playing, let's say, a two-player game for the second or third time. Then you can definitely get it down or closer to 60. But I would not consider it a locked in 60-minute game. But it does give you a lot for the 60 to 90 minutes that it takes. It gives you a lot of strategy and a lot of choices and a lot of decision-m that can be incredibly satisfying. As far as what I don't like in the game, not really a ton. I would say that my biggest critique would be that after a few plays, despite all the variation that comes from the small tweaks that are different game to game, because it's so tight, because it's so distilled, it almost reminds me like White Castle to a degree, that kind of idea that you have nine actions and it's just everything comes down to how you make the most out of the small minutia of those actions.
This game does have a little bit of that same element where across multiple plays, it starts to feel like it's coming more towards optimization of the game as opposed to exploration of tons of different strategies. The core idea of what you're doing is going to be very similar game to game. It's about finding small minutia that are slightly more efficient in each game in order to maximize what you get out of the engine. As far as I can see others not liking the game, it definitely can be AP prone. Uh, it's one of those games that if you play with players who like take back seis, like to constantly try to figure out, oh well, I should have done this, I should move that, I want to do this. What about how am I going to maximize the the goods that I get this round? Because goods you don't spend can degrade. And so you need to be mindful of are you being the most efficient. Just because something gives you a lot of things doesn't mean it's giving you the things that's right for you. And so you have a choice. You either take forever to figure out what's the ideal or you find yourself in that almost take back seat situation. So, if you play with players that do that and you don't like that, that could be a factor in the game. It's also very thinky. That's a plus for some. It's definitely a plus for me, but it's uh one of those things that if you're like looking for a lighter experience, this is a mentally crunchy game and just know what you're getting yourself into. As far as final thoughts on Opera Magna, this is a very charming game that I think does an excellent job. Tomasa in general, as a designer, I find I usually do like his design, so it's not a surprise to me the fact that I like this as much as I did, but it is very crunchy. My biggest hesitancy diving into it was was you get enough done in nine actions? And you absolutely do. I think nine actions is the perfect game length to feel like you're able to experience most of what you need to see. You're mostly able to build up the opera. You have built up
most of your tableau. You really, it feels like a almost a perfect sweet spot. Another round might be a little bit too much. Another round less might be around too few. You get to do a lot in the game while trying to maximize how you build up everything and taking advantage of what again what I think is one of the more clever market systems I've seen. The only thing that holds back for me, like I said, is that aspect where it does feel like as I play it multiple times that I'm already seeing the flow of the game and it comes down to optimization of the flow rather than exploration of different strategies. Overall, I'm going to come in at a four out of five. As far as other game recommendations, definitely check out Tua. If you're looking for a game, a Tua is an excellent game that is going to give you a lot of Yuri goodness while trying to contribute to a degree towards a cathedral to an extent. That's the the element that's similar, but there's a lot of different strategies and a lot of buildings that will totally change the way you engage with the game or game over game. And then I mentioned it already, but the White Castle, this game does in terms of the the crunchiness of it all in terms of how much you get done and how much every action matters, this game is very reminiscent of the White Castle. Maybe it's just the nine rounds and nine turns. The fact that you have nine turns in both, but you managed to do a lot with those nine turns definitely gave me a lot of similar feeling over there. I mentioned that Allplay is a channel sponsor. If you go to allplay.com, you can find a ton of games. And if you want to build up your own little thing instead of uh contributing towards a general uh thing, you can check out Honeybuzz. Honey Buzz is a game you can find from one of AllPlay's partner publishers. And if you're in the US, you can get anything from anyone from AllPlays, partner publishers, and all that for $4 flat rate shipping. In any case, until next time, I'm Alex from Board Game Co. Hope you found this review helpful. And as always, I hope you have a good one.